Текст книги "Ashen Winter"

Автор книги: Mike Mullin

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

Chapter 22

I saw Darla’s shoulders trembling and said, “Let’s pick up the pace.”

“Yeah. C-c-christ, I’m cold.”

“And hungry,” I added.

“Thirsty, too. I’d even eat some s-s-snow, but that’d just make me c-c-colder.”

We started jogging across the ice. Darla fell twice. Both times she took my hand, levered herself up, and kept going without comment. Wiping out had to hurt, but she ignored the pain, determined to keep us moving forward.

It seemed like it was taking way too long to cross the river. I mean, yeah, the Mississippi is huge, but we’d been jogging twenty or thirty minutes.

“How much farther?” I asked.

“How should I know? Keep moving.” Her voice was huffy from exertion—or annoyance.

Not five minutes later we finally reached the bank.

“Head downstream following the bank?” Darla said. “That’ll take us farther away from the barge.”

“Yeah.”

We jogged south, away from the lock and barges, skirting around big snowdrifts. After a while, the bank started to curve to the right. As we followed it, I noticed the trees were bigger here—their branches hung far out over the river ice. When I caught a glimpse of a tree to our left, I figured out where we were: traveling into an inlet, a frozen tributary of the Mississippi.

Darla stopped. “Let’s make a camp here. That bend should shield us from anyone at the lock.”

“Okay. So how are we going to build a fire?”

“Rubbing sticks together.”

My chest sank. “Um, that’s going to take for-freaking-ever.”

“Not the way we’re going to do it.” Darla explained what she wanted me to do.

I had to do most of the work. Darla was still shivering badly and spent a lot of time running in place or slapping her legs, trying to stay warm. I split a small cottonwood log twice, forming a roughly flat plank that Darla called a fireboard. Another piece of the log became a small rounded grip—a thunderhead, again according to Darla. I whittled an eight-sided spindle out of a cottonwood branch. A long, curved oak branch became a bow, and one of my bootlaces served as a bowstring. I discovered that the inner bark of cottonwood trees would shred nicely to form a fine, dry firestarter or bird’s nest. It took more than an hour to gather and make everything we needed.

Then we put it together and tested it. I wrapped the bowstring around the spindle, which I placed vertically between the fireboard and thunderhead. The idea was that I’d use one hand to hold the thunderhead in place and the other to pump the bow back and forth, to rotate the spindle. In turn, that’d generate friction between the spindle and fireboard and, hopefully, create a spark.

Of course it didn’t work. The bootlace slipped on the spindle, and we had to tighten it. Then the spindle kept flying off the fireboard, and we had to cut a deeper dimple to keep the spindle in place.

While we worked on fixing our makeshift fire-by-friction set, I asked Darla where she’d learned how to build it.

“From Max’s Boy Scout Handbook,” she replied.

“I thought he quit scouts after a month?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t know that. I just thought the book looked interesting. And it was.”

Finally we got it all working. I sawed back and forth on the bow, holding the thunderhead with my other hand, trying to keep even pressure on it. Both ends of the spindle started smoking in surprisingly little time, just a minute or two. About thirty seconds after the spindle started smoking, a spark fell out of the thunderhead onto my glove. I froze, trying to avoid any sudden move that might extinguish the spark, not caring if it burned my hand.

It winked out.

“Well, at least we know it works,” Darla said. “The spark is supposed to come from the fireboard, not the thunderhead. I wonder what we’re doing wrong?”

We set it up again. I was surprised by the spindle—it was noticeably shorter. Deep black holes had been drilled in both the fireboard and thunderhead. Darla put one hand over mine on the thunderhead and grabbed the other end of the bow. Working together we could pump the bow much faster and more smoothly. Less than 30 seconds had passed before smoke was pouring from both ends of the spindle.

I heard a cracking noise and the thunderhead broke. The end of the spindle hit my palm, twisting the nylon and burning my hand through my glove. I snatched my hand back and the spindle went flying. It had drilled clear through both the thunderhead and fireboard.

I shook my hand and looked down. The hole in the bottom of the fireboard was nearly filled by a huge spark glowing atop the ash.

“Now I know what we were doing wrong,” Darla said. “We were supposed to put a notch in the fireboard to let out the spark. Probably supposed to lubricate the thunderhead somehow, too.”

I gently lifted the fireboard. There were bits of snow and ice around the spark on the floor of our foxhole. If any of those melted, our spark would be extinguished. I picked up my knife and slid the blade under the spark.

Slowly, very slowly, I lifted the spark while groping around for the bird’s nest. Darla placed it in my hand. I gently slid the spark off my knife and into the nest, cupped in my left palm.

The spark was growing, igniting some of the black dust I’d scooped up along with it. I scooped some more of the dust from the fireboard with the blade of my knife and gently fed it to the spark. It grew larger still, a glowing coal nestled in the shredded bark on my palm.

I whispered to my spark, letting my breath coax it, “Burn. Burn, damn it, burn.” And with a pop and whoosh, it obeyed. The bird’s nest flared to life. I set it down slowly, not caring if it singed my fingers. We had made fire—created life!

We fed the fire together, starting with slivers of leftover wood and quickly moving on to twigs and branches. Darla’s hands shook so badly that the twigs she dropped occasionally missed the fire altogether. I shuddered to think what might’ve happened if the fire-by-friction set hadn’t worked.

I took the hatchet and cut three long limbs with forks on their ends. By jamming each branch into the snow and interweaving the forked ends, I created a rough tripod next to our fire. I took Darla’s frozen clothing off my belt and draped it over the tripod to dry.

Darla was huddled right up against the fire, getting warm. I squatted next to her. “Let me see your hand,” I said.

She held out her right hand, and I pulled off her glove. She had two roughly parallel crescent-shaped wounds between her palm and the base of her middle finger. Benson had bitten her so hard he’d drawn blood. The bite was scabbed over, but the flesh around it was red and swollen. I got some clean snow to scrub her wound.

When I started washing it, Darla screamed. I found a mostly clean leftover piece of cottonwood and gave it to her to bite. “Sorry,” I said. “I gotta clean it.”

Darla nodded, tears rolling down her face. I kissed her cheek, tasting salt. She laid her hand back in my lap, and I resumed scrubbing while she cried.

“I think it’s getting infected,” I said as I finished.

Darla just moaned.

I put her glove back on and rooted around in my jacket for a minute. I’d kept the Cipro tablets zipped into my inner pocket with the kale seeds. I took out a tablet and handed it to Darla. “Take this.”

She spit the piece of wood out from between her teeth. “They’re for you.”

“I’ll take a half.”

“How many do you have left?”

“Five, counting that one.”

“Aren’t you supposed to take antibiotics for, like, ten days or something?”

“Doc said seven. I’ll take a half. If you take full ones today and tomorrow and then go to halves like me, we can make five tablets last three more days. By then maybe we’ll be in Worthington. Maybe we’ll be able to buy some more.”

“My mouth is too dry to swallow this damn horse pill.”

“I’ll get some clean snow.”

We had no pan to melt the snow in, so we put little balls of it in our mouths to melt. That was tolerable with the fire roaring beside us. Darla swallowed her Cipro, and I cut a tablet in half with my knife. The rough edge of the tablet caught in my throat. I had to eat a bunch more snow to choke it down and wash away the nasty taste it left in my mouth.

Then we cleared off snow from a larger area to sleep in. By the time we’d done that, we needed more firewood. So we spent at least a half hour chopping enough wood to last through the night.

I felt woolly, like I’d been awake for three days straight. My eyelids drooped, and I had to force myself to concentrate as I chopped wood lest the hatchet miss and add to our growing inventory of injuries.

But Darla looked even worse. Her eyes made a pair of black holes in her face. She was yawning almost nonstop.

“Go to sleep,” I said. “I’ll take first watch.”

“We can both sleep if we build up the fire first.”

“What if Black Lake finds us? We’d better take turns.”

Darla used a couple of small logs and one of her scarves to make a crude pillow, and then she lay down beside the fire. Within seconds her breathing slowed as sleep claimed her.

I wanted nothing more than to curl up around her and sleep, too. But I knew it wasn’t safe. I sat in the volcanic ash beside Darla and watched her chest slowly rise and fall. The firelight played in her hair. I reached out to stroke it but thought better of it and pulled my hand away—I didn’t want to wake her.

I felt suddenly morose. What was I doing, dragging Darla back into Iowa? Her parents were dead—she had no particular reason to want to find mine. Already she’d been injured. If I got Darla killed on this insane trip, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.

Chapter 23

I struggled to stay alert, trudging back and forth beside the fire. When I saw the first hint of dawn in the east, I shook Darla awake. “I gotta sleep,” I said. She mumbled something and pushed herself upright. I was fast asleep before my head fully settled on the log.

It seemed like no time at all had passed when Darla pushed on my shoulder, saying, “Alex, wake up.”

I startled fully awake, sat up, and looked around. “Something wrong?”

“No, everything’s okay. But we should get going.”

“What time is it?”

“I don’t know. Around noon, maybe.”

Darla was dressed in her own clothes, and my coveralls were laid out on the tripod by the fire. I slipped my toasty warm coveralls on, struggling to pull the legs over my boots.

Darla fiddled with a bundle of wood. “What’s that?” I asked.

“I worked on the fire-by-friction set while you were asleep. Made a new thunderhead out of oak, so it won’t burn through. We’ve got two extra spindles now, too. Here’s your shoelace.”

I started relacing my boot while Darla tied all the fire-by-friction stuff into a neat bundle using a drawstring she’d cannibalized from her jacket. We kicked snow over the fire, tore down the tripod, and set out.

“Which way?” I asked.

“Maybe follow this creek upstream? Easier to walk on the ice. Hopefully we’ll hit a road.”

“How far is it to Worthington?”

“I don’t know, exactly. We’re near Bellevue. It’s about thirty miles from Worthington to Dubuque, but I think Bellevue is farther. Maybe forty or forty-five miles?”

“That’s going to take forever if we have to walk through deep snow. And I’m already famished.”

“Let’s see what the roads are like. If they’re bad, maybe I can improvise some snowshoes.”

We’d walked along the creek until we reached a railroad trestle that passed about twenty feet above the ice. Beyond that, I saw the concrete pylons and steel girders of a highway bridge.

We walked under the railroad trestle and turned to fight our way up the bank between the two bridges. The bank wasn’t steep, but the snow was so deep that it was difficult to force our way upward. For every step we managed, we slid back a half step.

Finally we got to the top, only to confront an enormous berm of plowed snow alongside the road. I led the way up the berm, thrusting my hands into the snow to make tenuous grips and kicking footholds into the side of the pile. The snow here was a filthy blend of volcanic ash and ice plowed off the road.

We hid near the top of the berm, watching the road for more than an hour. Nothing moved. There was no sound but the chattering of our teeth. I was worried about patrols, but it would take too long to get to Worthington traveling cross-country.

I got down the far side of the berm to the road by sliding on my butt. We were on a two-lane plowed highway.

“You think all the roads are this good?” I said.

“I hope so.” Darla stood and dusted the snow off herself. “We’ll make good time on this. Maybe get to Worthington in two, two-and-a-half days. Before we starve, anyway.”

“I guess there is one advantage to FEMA being in Iowa now.” Last year none of the roads on this side of the river had been plowed.

“That’s the only good those ass-puppets do.”

“Yeah.” I looked up and down the highway. “Which way?”

“Right. North. Worthington is northwest of us somewhere.”

“Won’t that take us closer to the lock and Black Lake?”

“Yeah. We’ll turn west as soon as we can.”

We made great time on the packed snow of the road. We didn’t talk—I was listening for engine noises and continually glancing behind us. I hoped there wouldn’t be any Black Lake trucks, but if any trucks did come, I wanted time to try to get away, although that might be impossible—the piles of snow and ash alongside the road were so high that we were essentially trapped.

We got off the highway onto a back road at the first opportunity. Darla led us through a dizzying succession of turns, heading north and west, she said. The roads were all deserted, which was a relief but also a bit puzzling. Why bother plowing roads nobody was going to use?

We passed six or seven farmsteads. All of them were clearly abandoned. About half the houses had burned. “Why do you think so many houses are burned?” I asked.

“Probably people took shelter in them and lit fires in places they shouldn’t have,” she replied. “You build a wood fire in a hearth that’s only designed for a gas log, you’ll burn the house down quick-like.”

As twilight set in, we stopped at a farmstead. It consisted of two cylindrical concrete grain silos and a one-story farmhouse. There were three hillocks of snow that might have been collapsed barns or sheds—I couldn’t tell. The front door and door trim of the farmhouse were missing—a drift of snow more than two feet deep graced the entryway. It was too dark inside to see much, but what I could see wasn’t pretty. The house had been thoroughly looted—furniture, doors, door trim, baseboards, and cabinets were all missing, probably burned as firewood. The mantle around the living room fireplace was gone, leaving an ugly hole in the wall, but there was a tiled area around the fireplace where we could safely build a fire. A big sooty stain proved we weren’t the first people to build a fire there, although there were no other signs of past occupants.

Darla started setting up the fire-by-friction set while I looked for wood. Everything burnable inside the house was gone. There were a bunch of trees outside, but all the lower limbs and smaller trees had been cut. I picked out the smallest of the remaining trees and started the long process of felling it with my hatchet—a job that really required a chainsaw or at least a full-size ax.

It was almost an hour later and fully dark by the time I returned to the living room with an armload of wood. I could barely make out Darla’s form hunched over a tiny, glowing spark.

“This is so cool—this black dust the set makes will keep a spark alive, like forever. We’ve got to find some way to store this stuff.”

“Sorry I took so long. Had to cut a tree down to get at the branches.”

“It’s okay. Make me a bird’s nest, would you?”

It was so dark, I could barely see anything. I stripped the bark from a couple of branches, working by feel. I took off my gloves to make it easier to shred the bark, and soon my hands were freezing. Darla stayed hunched over her spark, feeding it with black powder from the fire-by-friction set and fanning it gently with her knife blade.

“I think this thing is ready,” I said, holding the bird’s nest out to Darla.

“Just hold it next to the spark.” Darla cut the spark in two with her knife and lifted half of it into the bird’s nest.

I slowly lifted the bird’s nest to my lips. I whispered to it, “Burn, baby, burn,” letting the gentle breath of my whisper fan the spark. Darla was feeding the other half of the spark more black powder, building it up in case mine died.

A strand of bark flared orange, looking like the filament in an old incandescent lightbulb. A tiny flame followed, and in seconds the whole bird’s nest was engulfed in fire. I laid it down in the middle of the tiled area. It threw off just enough light that I could find pieces of kindling to feed it.

Darla abandoned the rest of the spark and helped me feed the fire. I offered to get more wood, but it was so dark out that I wasn’t sure I could find the tree I’d felled again. I took a flaming stick out of the fire, hoping to use it as a torch. It went out before I even reached the front doorway.

I bent low, using the faint glow of the embers still clinging to my stick to follow my footprints back to the tree. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to find my way back to the house, but the glow of the fire was clearly visible through the open maw left by the missing front door.

That aroused a new worry: What if someone came by? It would be obvious from the light that we were camping in the abandoned house. But we hadn’t seen anyone on the roads all day, and it would be even harder to travel by night.

I broke more small branches and carried them back to the house. “We’re going to need some bigger logs to keep the fire going all night,” Darla said as I dropped the wood.

“I can’t see well enough to use the hatchet,” I replied.

“Hmm.” Darla gathered up several long, slender branches, arranging them in a bunch. She thrust one end into the fire. When she pulled it out, the tip of the bundle was engulfed in a steady flame that survived movement, unlike the single branch I’d used. “Come on. I’ll hold the light for you.”

With Darla clutching her makeshift torch and me chopping, we got enough wood to last the night. By the time we finished, I was hungry and thirsty. I’d been hungry all day—there was nothing I could do about that. But the thirst I could deal with. “I’m going to get some snow,” I said.

I didn’t bother taking a torch. Snow was easy to find—it was everywhere. I molded two cantaloupe-sized snowballs and carried them inside. Darla took one, broke off a piece, and put it in her mouth to melt. “Just when I get warm, I’ve got to eat this damn snow,” she said.

“Beats going without water.”

“I guess. Let me see the hatchet.”

I passed the hatchet to her. She wandered around the bare living room for a minute, staring at the ceiling and floor and holding the hatchet by her side. Just as I was getting ready to ask her what in the world she was doing, she gripped the hatchet firmly in two hands and buried it with a thunk in the floor.

She swung the hatchet like a madwoman, chopping at the floor. Tufts of ash-filled, mildewed carpet flew everywhere. Darla was quickly coated in ash and dirt. She looked like a chimney sweep turned ax murderer: completely insane.

Chapter 24

“What are you doing?” I yelled.

“I am sick . . .” The hatchet thunked back into the carpet. “Of eating . . .” A chunk of wood from the subfloor flew up. “Snow!” Darla slammed the hatchet back into the floor.

“Take it easy. How’s killing the floor going to help?”

Darla didn’t answer, just kept destroying the floor. I saw wood joists and a rectangular metal heating duct through the ragged hole she’d opened. Darla turned her attention to the heating duct, slamming the hatchet into it with a clang and screech of tearing metal.

I heard another noise when Darla hit the duct, an almost musical tinkling, kind of like a bottle rolling on the sidewalk. It seemed to be coming from the far side of the room beneath one of the windows. I followed the path of the duct with my eye—it led straight to a grate in the floor.

I stepped over to the grate, giving Darla and the wildly swinging hatchet a wide berth. She was still whaling on the ductwork, trying to cut it or rip it up out of the floor. Had the cold and hunger tipped her over the edge?

I couldn’t see what was holding the grate in place, so I got my fingernails under its edges and pulled it up. It came free fairly easily. The duct behind it jerked and shivered as Darla whacked the other end of it. I clearly heard something rolling around. I reached down into the duct and withdrew a half-full bottle of Canadian Mist.

“Hey,” I yelled, “check this out.”

“Just a sec.” Darla was totally focused on butchering the heating duct. A big chunk of it came free with a metallic shriek. She set aside the chunk of metal and let the arm holding the hatchet fall. “That was in the duct?”

“Yeah, someone must have hidden it down there. You think we should drink it?”

“I dunno. Alcohol has calories. Maybe it would help.”

I unscrewed the cap and sniffed the bottle. Even the smell of alcohol made my empty stomach turn and clench. “I’d probably barf.”

“Yeah. Let me finish, and then we’ll put that whisky to good use.” Darla started hacking at the piece of ductwork with the hatchet and knife. The sheet metal was thin and soft enough that our knife would cut it—although Darla was straining at it, holding the duct in one hand and sawing the knife back and forth with the other.

I groaned, thinking about what she was doing to the edge of the knife. We didn’t have a sharpening stone. But saying anything was useless—getting between Darla and a project was as futile as standing on a railroad track hoping to stop a train with an upraised palm.

So I watched while Darla shaped the sheet metal into a rough, square pan. Each corner had a triangular fold, and the top was sharp and ragged, but it looked like it would hold water. “Tada,” she said. “No more eating snow.”

“That’s great. But will the hatchet still cut wood?”

Darla picked it up and looked at the edge. Even by firelight, the nicks and dull spots were obvious. “We’ll look for a stone to sharpen it on tomorrow.”

I shrugged and loaded the balls of snow into the pan. Darla set the pan at the edge of the fire. Then she plucked the bottle of whisky from the floor.

Darla sniffed the whisky and wrinkled her nose. She lifted the bottle to her lips and took a huge swig.

“Ugh, that’s disgusting,” she said, coughing as she passed the bottle to me.

Disgusting or not, I couldn’t let Darla show me up. I raised the bottle to my mouth and knocked back as much as I could swallow at one gulp. It was horrid—a smell like paint thinner and a sharp taste so strong it burned my throat. I bent double, gasping and coughing, trying to clear the alcohol sear from my nostrils. Once that passed, though, it tasted kind of good for a few seconds, sort of like smoke from a campfire. But the pleasant taste passed, too, and then I was left with nothing but the chemical aftertaste of the cheap whisky.

“Maybe this stuff does have calories, but I don’t think I want to drink any more,” I said.

“Me, either,” Darla replied. “Maybe we can find some real food tomorrow. Save the rest of the alcohol to use as an antiseptic.”

“Makes sense. Let me see your hand.” I gently stripped off the makeshift bandage from Darla’s palm. The wound looked better—a little puffy and swollen, but there were no red streaks, and it didn’t smell bad. I washed it as best I could with whisky, then rebandaged it, using more cloth torn from my undershirt.

“Your turn.” Darla took the whisky bottle and went to work on my side. It looked a lot better, the red streaks had mostly faded, and it didn’t smell like roadkill anymore. By the time Darla finished washing and bandaging me, we’d torn up more than half my T-shirt. All that remained were the shoulders, neck, and a ragged fringe of cloth hanging partway down my chest.

“If you keep using my clothes for bandages at this rate, I’ll be naked in a few days,” I said.

Darla laughed. “Fine by me. I’ll enjoy the naked boyfriend show. Might be a bit cold for you, though.” She pulled the makeshift pan away from the fire. All the snow had melted.

“Yeah, maybe I’ll wait until we get somewhere warmer before I let you rip all my clothing to rags.”

“Deal.”

We waited a bit for the pan to cool, then carefully sipped warm water from its sharp edges. “We’ve got six bags of wheat. Maybe we should cook one?”

“We don’t need to,” Darla said. “We should make it to Worthington the day after tomorrow.”

“Better to keep up our strength. How do you cook wheat, anyway?”

Darla shrugged. “Boil it like corn? I don’t know.”

I refilled the pan with snow. When that melted, I dumped a bag of wheat in. While I waited for that to boil, I whittled flat spots on a couple of sticks—improvised spoons.

I had no idea how long to cook it. After about fifteen minutes of boiling, I scooped out a few kernels with my stick. They were so hard that they were difficult to chew, and they had an unpleasant, hairy texture.

“How is it?” Darla asked.

“Not good.”

She frowned. “Let’s get some sleep. Figure it out in the morning.”

I pulled the pan off the fire and started getting ready for bed. We hadn’t had any Cipro yet that day, so I split a tablet and handed half of it to Darla. She choked it down with a grimace.

The floor beside the fire was hard, but we were so tired it didn’t matter. I wrapped Darla up in a hug and kissed her goodnight. We slept like that, our limbs entangled, warmed by each other and the comfort of our hard-won fire.